LISNews Librarian And Information Science News

This only works if you're the only one to think of it. In the library where I work, I get a dozen students a day looking for their textbooks during the first week of the semester. We don't carry that many textbooks, and if we do it's purely by chance (and even then we only have one copy). So the students all end up disappointed to find out that one of their classmates already beat them to the book. And I don't think anyone has been able to keep renewing their book for the semester, because other students in the class usually ask to be put on the waiting list. Then they ask us to order the textbooks through interlibrary loan, which we do. But we warn them that we are not likely to be able to get the book - which is usually what happens, because most other colleges do not lend out their textbooks or do not have any copies to lend because their own students have checked them out.

I can understand that if a college student is desperate to save some cash, they would want to check the library for their textbook. But it's not a reliable way to obtain them, for the reasons I mentioned above, and also because we may not have the most current edition.